


Hero

by quantumvelvet



Category: Star Wars Legends: Knights of the Old Republic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-18
Updated: 2016-12-18
Packaged: 2018-09-09 11:43:24
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,354
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8889451
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/quantumvelvet/pseuds/quantumvelvet
Summary: In the wake of Malak's defeat, the woman who was once Revan has to deal with her new role.





	

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Margo_Kim](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Margo_Kim/gifts).



The medal ceremony is lovely and stifling, all practised speeches and practised gestures, not a word or a hair out of place, and by the time it's halfway through, she wants to start screaming and never stop. They award her in the name of a dead woman, one to whom she only feels the most tenuous of connections – fractured memories and a throbbing well of power that lets her feel the pick and scratch of worry and resentment and exhaustion that underlies the polished political facades – and who she wishes she could leave as buried as rumour has so recently held.

She agreed to this, she reminds herself, time and again. She agreed to retake a name that doesn't feel like hers, to allow the politicos to dress her in the skin of the prodigal knight returned. It's better for the rest of the galaxy. They need to know that people – that monsters – can come back from the darkness if they're ever to heal from the war that had ground more people and planets than she can stomach thinking about into bloody dust. Even then, she thinks she might have refused, if it weren't for the very personal stake she has in the narrative of redemption, if not for her own sake, then by association.

Yuthura Ban. Dustil Onasi. Even Juhani, though save for the small crew of the Ebon Hawk, everyone who might remember the Cathar Jedi's brief flirtation with the Dark Side is long dead, reduced to ash along with the bulk of the planet they'd called home. If she can come back, if Revan can walk back out of the darkness and break its stranglehold on the Republic in the process, then others can as well. There's a place for those who turned aside from the Sith, even in the final moments, and that place isn't blindfolded and standing against a featureless cement wall. If they can't execute her for her part – and the weight of gratitude from those she'd pulled out of the pit she'd tossed them into in the first place is solid enough for that, at least, to be unquestionable – then how can they justify doing so to anyone else?

And that's the joke that settles around her throat like a choking hand, and ensures that the moment she can, the moment the last hand is shaken and the last promise is traded, she escapes the ceremony and flees to the small stretch of carefully-cultivated garden on the terrace below. Revan hadn't walked back out of the darkness. Whoever she is, whoever she might be, she isn't that woman, brilliant knight and fallen general. She's a shadow, a strange new thing born into the skin of someone whose mind had been shattered too badly for even the strongest of the Masters to heal it. She still remembers her childhood on Deralia, her mother and father and siblings, family meals and squabbles, her brilliant mother's lessons on how to program a droid or slice through a security system as easily as her saber cuts air. She's had a little time to research her former self's life – putting those same slicing skills to good, or at least informative, use – and the histories don't match. Revan had been a foundling, with no kin anyone could find, born on a world several systems distant from Deralia. Whether that means those memories were invented whole cloth, or were borrowed from some other person, they aren't the memories of the woman she's supposed to be. Her entire life is different, up to the moment Revan died and their fates converged and she was created.

She thinks that if she were just a little bit more Revan – or perhaps a little bit less so – she might have rejected the responsibility for that woman's actions entirely. As it is, she has few of the memories, none of the logic, and all of the guilt. Worlds burned and thousands died, if not directly by her hand, then certainly by her orders. She created an army of monsters, twisted children into weapons that sought out and laughed at pain, and created the man who went on to destroy yet more worlds, yet more lives, as clumsy and remorseless as a child burning insects with a lens.

And then she struck him down, and broke his army, and the galaxy decided that mopping up her own mess makes her a hero.

The sound of a boot striking the affected stone surface of the garden path behind her jolts her out of her thoughts, and she turns, knowing already who she'll find behind her. She doesn't need the shape of his mind as reflected by the Force to tell her, though that's as familiar as her own name. (More familiar, she thinks with a flicker of weary humour.) Carth Onasi isn't the only person who would follow her out into the garden, but he's the only one who would both attempt to be circumspect (she's not certain Zaalbar knows what it means, and while she knows full well that Canderous and Jolee do, she also knows they wouldn't bother with it now) and still make enough noise that she'd hear him coming.

She can read his worry in the furrow of his brow, though he's wearing the small, crooked smile that had so charmed her during their first days on Taris, before she'd realized how much he hid beneath that cynical sense of humour.

“You know, if we snuck away now, we could break atmo before anyone knew we were missing,” she says, in hopes of forestalling the question she knows is coming. 'Why are you running away from your own medal ceremony' is a perfectly reasonable enquiry, after all. It just happens to be the one she absolutely doesn't want to answer.

“Do you really want to give Mission an excuse to come after you?” he asks, and she has to swallow a laugh at the thought. Not because it's absurd, but because she can picture it perfectly – the young Twi'lek may not have started out a pilot, but she'd spent enough time in the cockpit – and cajoled enough lessons out of Carth – that she could easily fly a small ship with Zaalbar to help her, and only a fool would assume she wouldn't be able to slice the security on one.

“Maybe not,” she says. “But if anyone can get out of a party without anyone noticing...”

“Except Zaalbar. And everyone would notice if he went missing.”

“Only because it would cut the servers' workload in half.”

“There's that,” Carth says. “So, why are we running away?”

She glances back past him, towards the celebration. It's not quite reached 'Tarisian nightclub' pitch, but the music and sound of voices leaking out are enough to tell her that everyone's well and truly settled into celebrating the fact that the galaxy hasn't been burned down by a half-competent tyrant.

“Don't you think this is a little much?” she asks.

“It's always a little much,” he says, and she can see the shadow of old bruises in the sympathy in his expression, and remembers that the circumstances of his rapid rise through the ranks had been far from ideal.

“How long before you stop feeling like an imposter?”

He shakes his head, and gives her another small, crooked smile. “I'll let you know.” There's a pause as he considers her, then offers, “I know for a fact that there's a maintenance access to the next terrace down, and it's never locked. We probably have half an hour before Mission decides we've gone and gotten mixed up in something interesting without her.”

She absorbs this, then gives him a grin of honest gratitude, and offers a hand. The question she doesn't want to answer is still waiting, she doesn't need the Force to know that. But for the moment, she's happy to accept the silent truce.

She isn't quite Revan. She isn't a monster redeemed, or a hero returned. But the person she is, whoever that is, whoever that will be, is at least fortunate enough to have some damn good friends.


End file.
